October 2020 books

Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn't expect to be as moved by this book as I was! I should have known it would get me in the end, seeing as it contains nostalgia for the Middle East as well as angsty feelings about growing up far away from extended family members. It also has worthwhile things to say/show about depression, Iranian food (yum), and the ways different cultures express affection.

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Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's hard for me to give a Malcolm Gladwell book a rave review because no matter how much it gets me thinking, I can't help remarking to myself, after every conclusion or chapter, "well, yes, but it's way more complicated than that." His anecdotes (and anecdata) are always interesting but they can never tell the whole story. In this book, I thought the strongest section was the one about the Brock Turner case. The rest was interesting and a good starting point for further research/reading.

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438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea by Jonathan Franklin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This really is an amazing story! The blurb I read said it was the best survival book of the decade and that wasn't really true, nor was it fair to the book to set it up as such. It is very good and absolutely worth reading, though.

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Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family by Omid Scobie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It's possible that you could like this book a lot more than I did, but basically, if you've been Online to any substantial extent in the last four years, you already know most of what this book has to tell you. The only new information for me were some of the behind the scenes chapters surrounding the logistics of establishing their own household and then the birth of their child. And I don't even follow this stuff super closely!

But even if the information is new to you, the way it is written here is just an absolute snoozefest. And I totally get why! These royals reporters need to maintain their access and they will not be able to do that if they write anything less than flattering. But this was borderline hagiographic, to the extent that I kept snickering thinking of the biography about Rebecca Porter from The Royal We - this real book sounds a lot like that made-up, over-the-top one.

So this book might be most interesting because of what it does not say and does not include, such as a single whisper about William's supposed infidelity or any real insight into Kate and Meghan's relationship.

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The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery by Bill James
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was completely caught off guard by this book! I checked it out on the understanding that it was about the Hinterkaifeck murders. Then I got a ways into it and realized it wasn't about the Hinterkaifeck murders after all, but it was so good that I kept reading anyway. Only to discover that...it IS kinda about the Hinterkaifeck murders.

So it was a JOURNEY. But a very folksy, warm one! In a book about a serial axe murderer! I KNOW. It was so weird at first, the way the authors talked directly to me as the reader, and the little jokes and asides they sprinkled throughout each chapter. It made a macabre subject extremely accessible, even for a true crime wimp like me.

(But I still didn't read this book after dark.)

This book is true crime and axe murderers but also a cultural history of early 20th century American railroad towns, and vigilante justice, and police force operations, and newspaper reporting standards, and all kinds of things. It is a close spiritual book cousin to I'll Be Gone in the Dark and a more distant one to Dead Mountain - slightly amateur, a bit DIY, but spine-tinglingly riveting.

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Majesty by Katharine McGee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was going to say this book was exactly what I expected, i.e., a thinking girl's The Selection, but it was actually a bit more than I expected! More than its predecessor, even! It has slightly more substance and a little less fluff than American Royals (but don't worry, there is still a ton of fluff).

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Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben Macintyre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At first I thought maybe Macintyre was spinning a story too grand for its source material - was this only going to be interesting because Sonya was a woman? But my skepticism melted away as soon as the book took me to the absolutely bonkers world of 1920s skeezy expat Shanghai. This is the real deal: spies, hidden radios, real marriages, fake marriages, betrayals, close calls, counterfeit documents, etc. But it is ALSO: broken hearts, dueling careers, pregnancies, childcare, nannies, laundry, school decisions, "my kid has been up with a cough all night but I reallllly need to send these secret messages," and MORE. So yes, this book would have been interesting even if Sonya was a man, but the fact that she was basically The Spy Who Had It All...it's absolutely delicious reading.

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A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think we have another Monet on our hands with this book: taken as a whole, taken as a reading experience, taken as a riff on Twilight, it's fun! But if I start to look at things a little more closely, it gets messy. There's insta-love, for starters, which I could NOT get past, no matter how hard I tried. There's the truly bizarre amount of detail included about wine, tea, VAMPIRE YOGA, smells, a castle in France, and black leggings. And then there's the pacing. Like, a character will mention a concept in passing and then the very next paragraph it's suddenly crucial to the plotline. But there are also chapters and chapters filled with horse-riding and (admittedly dreamy-sounding) baths in a castle turret...and then a spate of intense action is over within three pages, or happens while the main character is asleep.

So this book is more than a little silly, but it is absolutely harmless fun and that can be just the thing sometimes.

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Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here's the thing: this book, more than any other I have ever read, could have easily chopped off the first 237 pages. The heroine has essentially two jobs to do, and on page 238 is when she gets serious about doing them. Everything before that point is essentially her and a bunch of wink-wink historical figure cameos dinking around Elizabethan London.

But here's the other thing: this book has time-traveling vampires and if that isn't the escape I need in 2020, then I don't know what is. Dinking Around Elizabethan London is apparently my jam right now.

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